Suicide Highway

by Don Pendleton

  Bolan took cover behind an old Yugo, feeding a fresh 40 mm shell into the grenade launcher. Just because the attack was breaking up didn’t mean that he wasn’t still under attack. Slugs peppered the frame of the car, punching through sheet metal, making the Executioner glad he had the full length of the car to protect him. Reloaded, he swung around the left front fender and pumped off the explosive charge at a clot of dug-in gunmen. The window front that they were fighting behind suddenly became a volcano of black smoke and charred body parts.

  Bolan let the mostly empty rifle drop on its sling, drawing his Desert Eagle as an instant reload. A Taliban mercenary lunged from cover, but was thrown immediately back as a hole smashed through the center of his chest by a booming 240-grain hollowpoint round.

  Bolan crouched for cover, then made a hand gesture to one of the Palestinian gunmen up high. The man caught the movement, and for a moment Bolan wasn’t sure if the Hamas man was going to pull the trigger on him or help him out. The Executioner pointed ahead toward the battle-shocked street. Smoldering corpses lay askew amid chunks of rubble.

  The Palestinian jerked out of sight, bullets hammering the area around the hole he’d poked out of. Bolan reacted instantly, leveling the Desert Eagle at two men with rifles who were now visible to him, partially obscured by a chest high wall. Only their heads and rifles were visible, and they were easily twenty yards away, but the powerful Magnum pistol had easily three times that range, and the accuracy to hit a target the size of a melon. He triggered the big .44 once, twice, a third time and watched two nearly decapitated terrorists tumble lifelessly, no longer threatening the Palestinian who was giving him his bird’s-eye view.

  The man popped out and gave the soldier a thumbs-up. Bolan spotted a bloodied bandage on his arm, and the Executioner remembered the story that Jerrud had given him. This had to have been Haytham’s partner in rescuing Blake and Tera, the one hit by the overzealous idiot’s hail of bullets. He gave a quick point, then ducked back behind cover.

  The Executioner turned and looked for the target the Palestinian had indicated. It was like having a bird dog, Bolan momentarily mused. Except in this case, the pointer was risking his life because the pheasants didn’t take flight; they took aim with rifles that spat out death at the rate of 600 rounds per minute. He caught a flash of movement and hit the ground, flat on his chest, bullets sizzling over his head. The Desert Eagle roared until it was empty and Bolan rolled hard, his left hand plucking the Uzi pistol from the shoulder holster. With a squeeze of the trigger, he was back in action, hammering the enemy gunman with a salvo of 9 mm slugs that finally stopped the two-way bulletfest.

  His arm felt slick, hot and wet, and he knew that his blood was soaking through the bandage. Bolan looked away from the injury, scanning for sources of new pain.

  That’s when a pair of hands shot out of a doorway, grabbing him around the head and neck, pulling him back into the depths of a building. Bolan’s feet kicked hard, trying to apply the brakes, his chin tucking down into his chest to keep a pair of hands or a wire from wrapping around his throat with choking force. Instead, one fist broke its grasp on him and slammed down onto his chest like a hammer, the thump making the soldier gag as breath and bile were forced up into his mouth.

  Rather than concentrate on the effects of the attack, the Executioner responded to it, both hands stabbing upward, fingers clawing at exposed ears and grabbing them in a death grip. There was a snarling growl of pain as the man tried to shake his head free, but the big soldier pulled his hands down hard. Flesh ripped.

  Bolan bent himself in two, bringing his ankles on either side of his enemy’s neck. Pulling all of his weight back down, he rolled the guy forward and over him. In the moment that he’d caught the man in a headlock, the soldier saw that the assailant wasn’t a local Taliban mercenary. He had to have been one of Abraham’s Dagger.

  He had memorized the file photos Tera showed him. The name Stamen crossed the Executioner’s computer-like mind, but he wasn’t going to be using that name much longer. Stamen whirled like a savage beast, trying to get his bearings when Bolan hammered down on him. The jolt of his fist slamming into the side of the Israeli’s neck made his injured bicep spike in agony again. Blood flowed more freely through his bandages, but the assassin halted for a heartbeat.

  Bolan pressed his advantage, bringing his knee up into the man’s gut before wrapping his hand around the side of Stamen’s head. With a savage lurch, he crashed skull bone into unresisting brick, blood and gray matter spurting from the impact point.

  “Still there?” Bolan asked.

  Stamen blinked his eyes, his lips trying to form words.

  “Wrong answer,” Bolan told him, driving his broken skull into the brick wall twice, each time increasing the size of the crimson splatter stain on the rough stone.

  Stamen slid down the wall, eyes staring blankly up at his executioner.

  Bolan saw people running for him and swung his rifle from its sling toward them, only to see Haytham, Blake and Tera. Bolan raised the muzzle and loaded a fresh magazine into place.

  “What kept you?” Geren asked.

  “Traffic,” Bolan replied. “Are you three okay?”

  “We’re standing,” Blake said. From the way his knees wobbled, the breath coming in ragged bursts from his mouth, he was a long way from convincing Bolan of the truth of that. “You came all this way to turn yourself in?”

  “No,” Bolan said, jacking a fresh round into his rifle’s breech.

  “Good. I’m too fucking tired to arrest you anyway,” Blake panted.

  “Haytham, what kind of transportation do you have?” Bolan asked.

  More Palestinians came out into the street, all of them regarding the Executioner and his companions with a level of distrust. He turned toward them, eyes narrowing.

  “Oh, by the way, there were two opinions about how to deal with me,” Geren spoke up.

  “Let me guess…you killed one of them,” Bolan said, looking at her red hands.

  “Their leader,” Haytham explained. “But he tried to kill her first.”

  Bolan cut through his circle of companions, stopping between them and the Palestinians.

  “I just risked my life to help you against the Israelis and their hired killers,” Bolan said. “And I need your help.”

  The Hamas men looked at him. Bolan, covered in blood, black greasepaint, midnight dark blacksuit, was an imposing sight standing before them. He unkinked his shoulders, cold blue eyes never blinking as he glared at them. “I am interested in finding the men who slaughtered innocent Palestinian women and children in the name of defending their country. Such cowards deserve to be hunted down and exterminated. You’re here on that mission, and that makes you a righteous ally in my book. We can work as a team, or we can be enemies. I don’t have time to make this choice into a long debate.”

  The Palestinians quickly began whispering to one another.

  “Are you with me?” Bolan repeated.

  “We are,” Sellil spoke up. “Where can we get justice, Colonel?”

  “Follow me,” the Executioner responded. “It’s your turn to be the Marines.”

  WITH HICKCOCK AND PLASTER hot on his heels, Wesley was charging across the gauntlet of Taliban gunfire. Rifles were chewing and spitting out thunderous volleys of death. The three racing Americans kept their legs pumping. For all the joking previously about Plaster’s slowness and Hickcock’s skinniness, the two men were taking this race against flying murder deadly serious. All that mattered now was crossing the nine, eight, seven yards to the door.

  Hickcock tripped, his long spindly arms flailing for air, but Plaster’s thick, short arm reached out, hooked the tall Marine’s arm and yanked him closer to him, cradling him like he was a football. Wesley threw his hand back and grabbed Hickcock’s other forearm and continued on, two racing sets of feet dragging the squirming man along. It took all of a heartbeat for them to cross two more yards, bullets still hammering their footsteps.
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  Wesley didn’t bother opening the glass doors. Unleathering his 9 mm Beretta and emptying the clip as he approached, he shattered the glass and left it a weakened mass of spider-webbed glazing. He tucked his head down, put one polycarbonate-shelled elbow pad up and hit the weakened barrier. For a moment, he stopped, the fractured pane holding against his weight, but Plaster and Hickcock both threw themselves against his back. All three of them tumbled through, sending a cascade of broken, diamondlike cubes skittering across the floor in front of them.

  “Everyone alive?” Wesley asked.

  “Fuckin’ A,” Plaster muttered.

  Hickcock shrugged. “Weren’t nothin’ we didn’t do in basic.”

  Wesley grinned at Marine modesty at its finest, then got to his feet, leading the way up the stairs. As they climbed, he slapped a fresh magazine into his Beretta, reholstered it and transitioned to the M-4 SOPMOD. The pistol itself was a good weapon, but it wouldn’t have the kind of reach and punch to take out enemy riflemen on distant rooftops, especially if they were behind any kind of cover. With ground-eating strides, he reached the rooftop and kicked open the door.

  A rain of steel-cored slugs swept through the doorway and Wesley dropped to the ground. Hickcock and Plaster luckily were half a flight lower. All three soldiers took cover against the steps as enemy bullets crashed through the rooftop access.

  “Too much firepower up there!” Wesley said to the others. “We can’t do a damn thing!”

  Plaster shook his head. “We made that run for nothing?” A slab of stone dropped just in front of the stocky little Marine’s face and he recoiled from it.

  Hickcock calmly wiped dust from his goggles and looked around. “This place is too urban, too many civilians in the area for us to call in Marine air support.”

  “Any kind of air support,” Wesley muttered. He felt the cell phone that Stone had given him begin to vibrate and pulled it out. “Colonel Stone?”

  “It’s Blake,” came a familiar voice. “Stone’s busy.”

  “Sir,” Wesley began. “I can explain—”

  “Can the explanations. We’re at war. We’ll just call it a breakdown in communications,” Blake said. “Speaking of communications breakdown, someone’s knocked out traditional radio broadcast in the area. We’re using cell phones and that makes us assume that the enemy’s using phones too.”

  “I wish I knew where they were jamming from, because then we could start getting word out that we need evacuation or support,” Wesley answered.

  “Someone’s on his way to help you out with that,” Blake said.

  “I’ll believe it when I see it, sir!” Wesley said.

  “I’m seeing it, and I’m still not believing it,” Blake answered.

  MACK BOLAN KNEW HE HAD only one chance to get to high enough ground to give the pinned down Marines and Green Berets at Chaman some breathing room. He rolled the Land Rover as close as he could to the tallest building in the district. Shell casings bounced off the roof of the vehicle and the sidewalk around him, letting the soldier know that he was going to need to do some fast cleanup work the moment he hit the rooftop. He did one last check of the Desert Eagle and the Uzi pistol, then cinched his M-4 tight against his back and brought the big BCB International 7080 Grapnel launcher to his shoulder.

  Tera Geren looked at him, holding the loops of grapnel coil, looking back toward their wheels. “You could just take the stairs,” she said.

  “And be too tired to fight when I get up there? Or have no one left to fight for?” Bolan asked. He nodded to the winch that was jury-rigged tightly to the front fender of the Land Rover. The lashings that bound the winch to the vehicle had been stripped off a crippled Humvee, and he hoped it would be enough to take what he had in mind. Half of the spool of launcher rope was spilled on the ground, only the very end hooked to a rappelling harness around his hips—another prize from the Green Beret’s wreckage. The other end of the line was being hooked up to the winch by Haytham.

  “When the hook gets up there, it’s going to attract a lot of attention anyway,” Haytham said.

  “I’ll take my chances,” Bolan said. “Clear the tube.”

  Geren handed him the grapnel hook and stepped back. Bolan dropped the warhead into the muzzle of the mortar. Pneumatic pressure launched the lightweight carbon-fiber hook at tremendous velocity, sailing it up and over the edge of the roof. He tossed the big launcher to Geren and grabbed the cord as it snapped like a whip against his palms.

  “C’mon,” he gritted to the grapnel, willing it to snag on the rooftop. It wasn’t the easiest shot in the world. The line yanked taut against him, and Bolan winced as the straps cut into him, then watched the cord grow slack as the hook was dragged back down by gravity.

  The rope stopped dropping in loops, and Bolan’s sharp blue eyes locked on the grapnel hook, hanging on the edge of the rooftop. “Haytham!”

  The winch yanked hard and Bolan gripped the rope with one hand, his long legs reaching in looping steps to keep his balance as he was pulled up the side of the building. He knew that if his feet slipped out from under him, he’d be dragged up the concrete like cheese across the face of a grater. Or his rope harness could snap or the hook could be dislodged by his weight or the effort of a terrorist on the roof, and he’d fall to the ground, either to die or end up with a shattered spine.

  Dying is not an option, he told himself. He’d faced death too many times to fear its chilling breath. Dying was not the Executioner’s plan, not when there were still people who needed him. Shirking his own safety to do what needed to be done was his duty to humankind as a whole.

  Bolan’s right foot slipped, and suddenly he was parallel to the wall, his knees hitting stone. Electric jolts of pain shot up his thighs and down his shins, and he bounced away from the building, the rope creaking as his weight shifted crazily. He knew that if he bounced again off the side of the building, he’d start losing control, and the winch, the grapnel hook, or both would become unsettled and unbalanced by his whirling form. Splaying his legs, he hit the wall again, and flexing his limbs, cushioning the shock and absorbing his momentum. His feet came a couple of inches back off the wall, but he stretched to keep the soles of his boots up against the rough surface.

  He returned his attention to the rooftop ahead when a solitary figure leaned over the ledge, rifle pointing down. The man cried out, and Bolan’s hand dropped to the Desert Eagle in its holster. But he knew it was going to be too late.

  15

  Heavy-caliber rifle bullets tore past. Trapped on the side of a building, being dragged up by a rope, he had no options to duck, dodge or escape. As fast as he was on the draw, there was no way for him to pull his pistol and punch a hole through the chest of the man trying to kill him.

  The Executioner waited what seemed like an eternity for the terrorist’s aim to improve, when he realized that there was no muzzle-flash issuing from the man’s weapon. With a jerk, the man seized up, his AK falling from lifeless fingers, the stock bouncing off Bolan’s injured arm, making him choke back a cry of pain. He glanced down to see Geren and Haytham, rifles raised toward the heavens, ready to gun down any man who aimed at Bolan.

  He showed the pair a thumbs-up, and kept going, keeping his balance, carefully crawling up the side of the building like some gigantic spider. Finally, after what felt like hours, though his watch only read three and a half minutes, he was at the top ledge of the building. He clamped one hand over the ledge and wrapped his other around the grip frame of his Uzi pistol. His shooting arm had taken beating after beating over the past few days, and he wasn’t going to trust that arm to hold his weight seventy feet above the ground, although he could still shoot and punch with relative ease.

  The muscles in his left arm swelled, and his legs pushed off hard. With a surging leap, he was on the rooftop, Uzi up and tracking targets.

  The Taliban gunmen were surprised by the sudden appearance of over six feet of solid black muscle and steel weaponry. One rifleman spun a
nd triggered his weapon, the stream of gunfire tracking too slowly to catch up with the approaching Executioner, who triggered his own Uzi only after lining up the front sight post, making sure that the weapon was on-target. Where the terrorist was only wasting ammunition, Bolan was wasting him with a precision burst of 9 mm slugs.

  Panic set in as the riflemen were torn between fleeing for their lives and opening up with their weapons. It looked to Bolan, for all the world, like a Keystone Kops episode, with four men slamming into one another in a tangle of limbs. One gunman accidentally triggered his autoweapon into the groin of another, dropping him in a pile at the feet of the three others who still struggled, unbalanced and confused.

  That confusion turned out to be fatal as Bolan swept them with an extended burst, burning off half the magazine. The hot slugs punched through flesh, causing the gunners to cry out, wither and die. The Executioner sidestepped the jumble of terrorists. Stuffing the Uzi back in its harness, he pulled the M-4 from its sling on his back. He came to a halt, kneeling before a three-foot segment of wall that framed the rooftop. He’d never properly sighted in the scoped carbine, and knew that whoever had shot the weapon before him would have had a different hand-eye coordination. That would put shots off to such a degree that he could miss enemy gunmen at even fifty yards away.

  The Executioner decided to test points of impact with a close up shot, lining up the crosshairs on the upper chest of a gunman some twenty yards distant. The Taliban shooter suddenly turned. The amplification of the M-4’s scope allowed Bolan to see his target’s eyes widen with horror. Bolan stroked the trigger and saw the bullet impact the man’s face above his right eyebrow, instead of his left cheekbone where the crosshairs rested.

  Having gotten his range, he swung toward another of the rooftop gunmen. Three more shooters had the sentences of their lives punctuated by Executioner marksmanship before the raining hail of death on the U.S. Special Forces compound stopped.